Designing Novel Approaches to Personalise Behaviour Change in Intelligent Systems

AI personalisation presents a promising source of innovation for improving the quality of behaviour change technologies. Current approaches are limited in their success, and a proposed solution is the inclusion of intelligent tailoring to best align users with their interventions. This thesis presents three key contributions that explore this promise: A classification system and accompanying survey to examine the current research landscape of intelligent personalisation; The E˙ect-Led Design process which combines high-eÿcacy, limitless expert design concepts with focused user discussion and refinement to best explore how to implement high eÿcacy AI that is acceptable to users; and a conceptual framework, the principles of which are tested in real-world situations to examine whether the intelligent algorithms are able to learn human behaviour and whether proposed systems of personalisation encourage motivation in users. The survey paper identified current trends in the contemporary personalised technology space and explored where the scope for innovation sits. E˙ect-Led Design showed promise in developing significantly di˙erent design concepts to those seen in contemporary applications, and both experts and users commented positively on the process. The studies testing the principles of the experimental platform showed the approaches were positively received by users in terms of motivation and engagement. However, initial implementation issues meant that algorithms did not return any significant evidence of learning. Further explorations into the algorithm through simulated studies using real-world data uncovered alterations that enabled learning. These combined outcomes provided a means to better explore the inclusion of AI in the digital intervention space, with a dedicated design process and investigation of the feasibility of a conceptual framework in this domain showing both the current potential of such a system and where future work can push these ideas to provoke e˙ective behaviour change

The Effectiveness of Oral Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatories versus Steroid Injections in Patients with Shoulder Pain

- The fact that shoulder pain is the most common musculoskeletal complaint in primary care shows that clinicians must have an arsenal of quality interventions to treat this problem. - The need for quality research and evidenced based guidelines are necessary to educate clinicians on their treatment options, the efficacy of those treatments, and their safety profiles.https://commons.und.edu/pas-grad-posters/1019/thumbnail.jp

Effective Field Theories for Top Quarks at the LHC and Physics Beyond the Higgs Boson

In this thesis we have considered applications of two different types of effective field theory. The first of these, Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET) has been applied to the calculation of top quark pair production at hadron colliders. Building on factorisation theorems developed using SCET we present results for resummed differential cross sections of the top pair invariant mass. The highest accuracy of resummation achieved and matched to fixed order is at NNLO+NNLL$'$. Resummed predictions are compared to fixed order ones and we find that while the (N)NLO results can be sensitive to the choice of factorisation scale, the resummed results exhibit more stable behaviour. We perform a number of additional analyses to further investigate the choice of scale on the invariant mass distribution. In addition, we also present results for the $p_T$ distribution of the top quark. The second piece of work presented in this thesis concerns the use of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT). The SMEFT augments the Standard Model with higher dimensional operators which can be viewed as the low energy realisation of some as yet undiscovered physics at high scale. We use the dimension-6 SMEFT to calculate the QCD corrections to Higgs decay to bottom quarks at NLO. The main result of this section is the NLO partial decay rate for the Higgs including the dimension-6 Wilson coefficients. Finally we attempt to remove the presence of large mass logarithms through the conversion of the b-quark mass to the $\overline{\text{MS}}$ scheme. We assess the reliability of this prediction in the limit of massless bottom quarks and find excellent agreement with the result with full mass dependence

Use of virtual reality in off-line robot programming

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3075204

The Effectiveness of Oral Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatories versus Steroid Injections in Patients with Shoulder Pain

Shoulder pain is the third most common musculoskeletal complaint in primary care. Therefore, it is important that we have quality evidenced based treatments to guide clinicians in treating shoulder pain. I examined in this review whether corticosteroid injection into the glenohumeral joint or oral NSAIDs was more effective in reducing shoulder pain as well as the side effects associated with each treatment modality. Search methods included the PubMed and Cochrane databases. Only studies comparing corticosteroid injection and oral NSAIDs were included and not each treatment individually. In conclusion, corticosteroid injections into the glenohumeral joint accelerate pain relief but have equal efficacy on long term follow up. Both corticosteroid injections and oral NSAIDs are superior to placebo but one is not superior to the other. Corticosteroid injections were associated with some local side effects with systemic side effects being rare. Oral NSAIDs do have an effect on the gastrointestinal system, kidneys, and cardiovascular system thus they are not recommended for certain patient populations. This study provides a good framework to guide clinicians in the treatment of shoulder pain but further studies need to be done to include a formal physical therapy program and the effect of these treatments on specific shoulder conditions

Assessment of the 1997 Commodity Flow Survey for State-Level Freight Transportation Planning

Urban travel demand modeling in the United States has a rich history in both practice and academic research. The same cannot be said, however, of freight demand modeling despite the intermodel planning requirements of IS TEA and TEA21. In most instances, agencies responsible for state transportation planning (e.g. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet) have applied, in a limited way, the methodology developed for urban travel demand modeling (i.e., Urban Transportation Modeling System or UTMS 1) to the freight arena (see, for example, Black 1997). Obviously, this methodological similarity implies that the fundamental data requirements for both types of demand modeling are also similar. For example, both models require estimates of the amount of traffic (i.e., number of trips for urban modeling and amount of freight for freight modeling) produced within each zone comprising the study area. Yet, despite such similarities, the two modeling systems differ significantly in terms of the availability of data for modeling purposes

Case Study: Value Added in the Oats Industry in Alberta and Western Canada 1998

Crop Production/Industries,

An Historical Overview of Crop Acres in Western Canada: A Graphical and Statistical Approach

Crop Production/Industries, Land Economics/Use,